Glee is all about mashups and feuds, so it should come as little surprise that Thursday’s episode, titled Feud, features both. There is a twist, however. Even though the bloom is off Glee’s rose — Glee is nowhere near the cultural water cooler conversation piece it was just a year ago — the writer-producers of one of broadcast TV’s most consistently inventive dramas are always looking to throw in an extra curve.

For the first time anyone can remember in the history of McKinley High’s glee club, not to mention Glee itself, the students give feuding teachers Mr. Schue (Matthew Morrison) and recently graduated Finn (Cory Monteith) an assignment, instead of the other way around. It’s part of the kids’ bid to relieve tensions between the two.

Jayma Mays, right, with Matthew Morrison in Glee.

The old-fashioned way of settling differences — on the school playground — is politically incorrect these days, not to mention unseemly for adults who are supposedly all about the healing virtues of song and dance.

Those who’ve watched Glee in recent weeks know the simmering tensions were brought about at least in part by his former student Finn’s forbidden kiss with Mr. Schue’s former would-be bride Emma (Jayma Mays), who left him at the altar in one of those it-could-only-happen-on-TV moments that longtime TV watchers know and love.

Glee devotees know, too, that the show is about the music as much as it is the drama, and the night’s song list includes the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, a throwback to the days when it seemed inconceivable that a weekly series like Glee — all that singing! all that dancing! — would ever make it on prime time TV.

Rachel (Lea Michele), left, and Kurt (Chris Colfer) in Glee.

The word is still out on the possibility of Glee’s returning for a fifth season in the fall, but renewal seems a mere formality at this stage. Glee is not Smash. It’s more firmly established. It’s younger and, even now, four seasons and 82 episodes in, it still seems fresh and capable of surprise.

Another new episode will air March 21, and then it will take a spring break of sorts until April 11. Glee’s season finale is slated for May 9. By then, its fate will be known. Fox officially unveils its fall 2013 schedule on May 13, kicking off a week of broadcast network fall scheduling announcements.

Expect to see Glee make the list. Smash, on the other hand — not so much. (Global, Fox, 9 ET/PT, 10 MT)

Three to See

• Elementary is definitely coming back for a second season: The reimagined, reinvented Sherlock Holmes tale has been at or near the head of this year’s freshman class since September.

In an episode called It’s Deja Vu All Over Again, Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) takes on her first solo case, that of a woman who vanished shortly after leaving her husband a tearful breakup video.

Meanwhile, Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) finds a new game afoot in the subway. But wait, there’s more: The two cases are connected, which means Watson may not be flying solo after all. As you were. (Global, CBS, 10 ET/PT, 8 MT)

• The mental geniuses in The Big Bang Theory aren’t always as bright as they let on. Wolowitz, for example, finds himself not knowing what to do when he receives a letter from his father, in an episode called The Closet Reconfiguration. Should he open it, or not? On such matters rests the fate of the universe. (CTV, CBS, 8 ET/PT, 9 MT)

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile